Before Photoshop: The Disturbing Art of Spirits Photography 👻
Since technology has allowed to capture images, photographers have used editing techniques to deceive people. One of the most fascinating examples is with the photography of spirits.
Spirit photography was a trend in which the photographer edited photographs in order to recreate ghosts or place figures of spirits with human beings. These images were often made with a double exposure technique, where one exposure overlaps the other, in the form of layers. Clients believed that the spirits of loved ones who had passed away communicated with them through these photographs.
Communicating with the dead was important to the Victorians because death seemed to be around them. In America, many people died in the Civil War, while in other countries, mortality rates were generally high. Diseases such as tuberculosis and its spread, and the life of the growing urban working class was hard in the era of the pre-sanitary revolution. In the mid-1800s there was also a period of rapid industrialization and progress, so connecting with the dead allowed people to feel tied to the past, and new religious movements incorporated spiritualism.
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Art Of Spirit Photography - News Of The After Life
One of William H. Mumler's most famous photographs, allegedly showing Mary Todd Lincoln along with another of his deceased husband Abraham Lincoln.
Spirit photography is photography that allegedly shows ghosts or other spirit. From the late 1800s to the beginning of the 20th century, it was common for andefotography to be used by spiritist media and the views on the authenticity of the images were shared.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Spirit
The American photographer William H. Mumler was first in the 1860s with the andefotography. Mumler discovered the technique by chance when there appeared another person in a photograph he took on himself, something that he realized was due to double exposure. He realized that there was a market for this and began to work as a medium. He photographed people and added pictures of deceased loved ones to the negatives, often with other photographs as a starting point. Mumler's fraud was finally discovered when he placed identifiable living persons in the pictures that breathe.
William Hopes Ghost Photo
After William H. Mumler, more and more anded photographers began selling pictures. From the 1880s to the early 1920s, andefotography continued to be popular, with advocates such as Arthur Conan Doyle and William Crookes. [2] [3] William Stainton Moses, another spiritist, claimed that the andefotography was ruled by a liquid substance called ectoplasma in which the spirits take shape. [4] Some spiritualists wrote books supporting theo-photography, such as Chronicles of the Photographs of Spiritual Beings and Phenomena Invisible to the Material Eye by Georgiana Houghton (1892) and Photographing the Invisible by James Coates (1911).
Spirit Photography Ectoplasm
An andphotography taken by William Hope
One of the latter andthotographers was William Hope (1863-1933). The researcher Harry Price managed to disclose that Hope's photographs were fraud by secretly labeling Hope's photographic records. Although Hope created several images of spirits, no one contained the marking, which showed that he had replaced the plates against prepared plates with fake portraits. In his book Fifty Years of Psychical Research, Price noted many andefotographers revealed as fraudsters. [5] Price that had spent most of his life studying psychological phenomena wrote that "There is no good evidence that an andthotography has ever been produced.
Victorian Spirit Photography & Spirituality
The faith revealing William Hope still retained a faithful number of spiritualists who believed in him, such as Charles Lakeman Tweedale author of Man's Survival After Death (1920), as well as the author and spiritist Arthur Conan Doyle, who refused to accept any evidence that Hope was a bluff and did big efforts to clean his name, including writing a book that supports andefotography, The Case for Spirit Photography
Acabo de quedarme helado con tales imágenes ! Muy buen post 👏🏻